


when we grew up (our shadows grew up too)

by dinosaur



Series: infinity times infinity [3]
Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Anxiety, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, Injury Recovery, Multi, Queerplatonic Relationships, Trans Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-19
Updated: 2015-05-19
Packaged: 2018-03-31 08:53:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3971710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/dinosaur/pseuds/dinosaur
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If he concentrates on the link he can still feel the ache deep in Harry’s bones, the snipping of Zayn and Liam over top zir head in the medical bay, the occasional prickle of Louis down in the cockpit. He closes his eyes and tries to pull back all the tendrils of himself locked into them. He just – he just needs a second. He just needs someone not wrapped up and locked into this to hold his hand and tell him to breathe for a second.</p>
            </blockquote>





	when we grew up (our shadows grew up too)

**Author's Note:**

> this takes place sometime after the cockpit scene in [it hurts to become](http://archiveofourown.org/works/3369920) and will probably not make sense if you have not read that. title from you are enough by sleeping at last
> 
> thanks to h for the beta and the support. and love to [lo](http://archiveofourown.org/users/hungerpunch) and [m](http://archiveofourown.org/users/prufrocks), for supporting me and this verse so gently and so continuously. y'all are bright bright clovers and i am very lucky to have you around. i hope this is good to you, thank you. <3
> 
> ref: niall and bressie are qp and bressie uses cae/caer pronouns. oh and neither of them are human, haha.

 

Niall taps the control panel to send a door sliding across the entryway and then leans back against it heavily. He rotates his arm back to press at the base of his secondary dorsals, where all his muscles have gone tight and painful.

If he concentrates on the link he can still feel the ache deep in Harry’s bones, the snipping of Zayn and Liam over top zir head in the medical bay, the occasional prickle of Louis down in the cockpit. He closes his eyes and tries to pull back all the tendrils of himself locked into them. He just – he just needs a second. He just needs someone not wrapped up and locked into this to hold his hand and tell him to breathe for a second.

He’s opening a connection to Bressie before he can think through it.

Bressie answers before he has a chance to shut it down. There’s interference in the comm, like Bressie’s in the middle of flying or messing with a lot of electrons. He bites his lip.

“Hey lad, something wrong?” Bressie says, intense and overly concerned at the edges.

Niall clenches his fingers. It does feel like lately he only talks to Brez when things have gone flares up.

“Hey Brez – no, yeah, just – “ Niall forces himself to inhale slowly and then exhale even slower, stretches and then relaxes his dorsals in turns. He flexes his throat and switches to Quasi, so Brez doesn’t have to keep on in English. “You got a moment?”

Bressie huffs a laugh quietly and makes the switch too, “Can make one. What’s up?”

“Yeah, just. Uhm. Are you okay to talk about like, you know, ugly stuff?” Niall winces.

It’s just sometimes Bressie doesn’t like talking about stuff, cause caer own past with anxiety and slow steps, he knows.

“Yeah, I’m okay,” Bressie says. Niall can hear caer smile.

He grins tiny in response and then pulls a deep breath. The edge of his pocket is worn. He locks his fingers to avoid tugging at it and takes another too full breath. “Does it- does it ever get better?”

There’s a deep silence.

“Does what get better, minim?”

Niall watches the grid lines of his floor swirl a murky, upset green. “Anything,” he whispers, finally, doesn’t know how to say something that includes himself and this moment and the future.

Sometimes he hears a noise and his body jerks like they’re crashing again. Sometimes he drifts off into a different dimension without meaning to, like his grip on the one where everyone else is, is weak and fluttering. Sometimes, it feels like the crash lives inside them, replays just when they feel the safest. _There any internal crash-clean-up crews for humanoids_ , Niall wants to ask.

“Some things,” Bressie says, slowly, “are always gonna hurt, Ni. There is no finish line for better or fixed or whatever.”

Niall picks at the frayed hem in his shorts, wrinkled just above his knee. The edge of his little finger rests over the hard line of the implant.

“I don’t mean physical.” Bressie says, in that way cae always does when cae’s wishing cae could protect Niall, but at the same time wanting to always, always be honest with him. Cae’s always been a harbor for Niall, with their similar, mismatched-half-specie bodies and histories.

Niall closes his eyes, “I know.”

It’s scary enough to think he’ll never run across a planet with too-low gravity again, scary to think his knee will never be able to handle the same forces again, the same reality twists flying vertical takeoffs require. It’s too deep, too sharp to think that it could be _worse_.

His knee could heal and something inside him will still ache and fester and remain a deep black-blue. There is no better. There’s just him and time and continuing on.

"I just don't know how -" Niall chokes, tries to restart his breathing. “- how can it feel like everything inside of me is breaking, but everything inside of me is already broken."

He laughs and it sounds empty and disgusting even to his own ears. It hurts his chest. He stumbles over to the hammock, wings dangerously wobbly. It swings wildly as he drops down on it.

“Oh, bud,” Bressie’s murmuring. “No, it’s just sometimes it’s the worst when the hurting finally starts clearing enough for you to see how much you’re hurting.”

Niall buries his face against the side of the hammock. “Is that what it is?”

“Could be. Could be everything is awful.”

Niall chokes something like a laugh.

Bressie makes soft sounds at him, goes into a lower dimension to send comfort in a stream like Maura always does when Niall reaches out back home. It’s soft, just the right level of familiar pressure. It pushes at something tense in Niall’s stomach, tugs loose some of the knots of tension. He breathes out and Bressie echoes it.

They breathe together, Niall letting himself sink into the same dimension as well as he can. It’s a little scary, his first time falling back into the giveandtake with another person’s wake since the crash, but it’s Bressie. It’s Bressie and cae’s always gotten that, gotten Niall like that. They take it slow, only shift through a few dimensions, one plane. Niall’s wings curl full, the primary dorsal stretching with muted pops like Liam does after he uncurls from a dream session with Harry.

The thought makes him smile, settles him into a higher dimension. Bressie feels it in the next breath.

“You sound so much fuller, steadier, even right now. You know that, right?” Bressie’s soft, like cae’s cupping the connection close to whisper to it.

Niall’s eyes prickle. He clenches them tight, clears his throat a bit to rasp, “Thank you. That – you know it means. A lot.”

It does. He wants to hear he’s doing good. Needs to know that they don’t look the same as they did, huddled in the wreckage of their lives, a laser’s width away from death. Or worse; disconnected.

“Do you want me to come out?” Bressie asks.

Niall pauses for a second. He’d love to have Brez around to coddle him, to kick him when he’s feeling lazy, to handhold him through this, but – he shakes his head, “No, we’re. You know.”

“You,” Bressie says, unsurprised.

“Yeah.”

There’s another lull, broken only by the vague echo of Bressie’s breath switching in between dimensions. Cae never stays long, anyway. Doesn’t like the pressed feeling.

Niall smiles a little bit at the joints of his hammock where the ship is fading in between pink and green, like a steady rocking motion.

_Go on_ , he nudges to it.

The joints flare a magenta and then start to move back and forth to gently sway the hammock.

“What’s that?”

Niall jumps a bit. “Huh?”

“You made a sound.”

“I did?”

Bressie laughs.

Niall laughs too, nuzzles at the soft edge of the hammock, feeling achy but a little lighter. “S’the ship. Wants to rock me.”

Bressie’s laugh trails off, “Like – “

“Like I’m laying down and it’s moving the hammock. Think it just likes doing things for us.”

“Huh.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” Bressie says and there’s a beep from a nearby nav system. Cae has to go soon, Niall knows. “Gimme a shout whenever you need, chief, okay?”

Niall curls into the hammock, keeps his breath steady, “Course. Thank you for –“ _for being there when everyone else walked away, for knowing what we needed, for telling everyone in the galaxies to fuck off, for not leaving, for saying it’s okay to not be okay, for knowing that was the thing to say, for_ “– everything.”

“Yeah, Nialler, course,” Bressie sends him a little tinge of affectionate nudging and lets go of the connection.

The ship makes a small ping as he goes, and Niall flicks a few calming gas cloud emojis at it. It goes quiet and humming around him in response. They sit for a while, the ship rocking Niall and Niall wandering in and out of realities, testing, breathing deep, feeling safely moored to the one around him.

It’s not fine really, but maybe it’s a little okay.

 

 

**Author's Note:**

> i wrote this originally as a method of coping with some of the hurty bits of ihtb and some of the more layered bits of niall as a character, and March 2015 happened and it became a way of dealing with that hurt as well. i've been sitting on this since bc it felt a little Too Much. sometimes, we put a lot of ourselves in things and i guess that's me today.
> 
> i guess i just wanted someone to tell be to chin up, it's gonna be okay. i guess i still want that.


End file.
